Daniel Kalder
theguardian.com
Although I have never worn a Che Guevara T-shirt, I have at least one thing in common with 99.999% of those who have: I don't know much about the Princess Diana of revolution. Yes, the legendary guerrilla was charismatic, gifted and fought "imperialism" … but what else? Well, in 1962 he told the Daily Worker that if he had had control over the bombs at the centre of the Cuban missile crisis, he would have launched them. The triumph of socialism was worth "millions of atomic war victims".
Che: A Memoir by Fidel Castro
by Fidel Castro
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Che, then, could happily justify mass murder by invoking Marxist-Leninist flapdoodle. But what else can be said about the man behind the iconic photograph? Who better to consult than Fidel Castro, the long-serving dictator of Cuba (ret) and author of Che: A Memoir? Against overwhelming odds, the two men and assorted comrades overthrew the Batista regime and then started building a new country together. Dedication to propaganda notwithstanding, Castro might over the course of an entire book accidentally let slip a few candid details about his comrade.
Well, he might if it were actually a memoir, but Castro's Che is a collection of official speeches and interviews with sycophants. The dictator is not to blame for the misleading title, however – that is the work of Ocean Press, the publisher.
The first 34 pages contain hero-worshipping introductory material. Attacks on Che and the authoritarian dictatorship he helped establish are dismissed by appeals to the authoritarian dictator, who is quoted in massive chunks of soul-rotting verbiage. The "memoir" proper begins on 3 October 1965 with a televised speech Castro delivered on the topic of Che's disappearance from Cuba. Rumours were circulating that there was a split in the revolution, or worse. Castro blamed the conjecture on sinister external forces: "The enemy has tried to sow confusion, to spread discord and doubt, and we have waited patiently because it was necessary to wait."
But why? Well, Fidel doesn't tell us, because he is busy abusing the lying, infantile imperialists. Sadly, his invective is no great vituperator, à la Gaddafi; rather, he lifts his insults directly from the International Handbook of Revolutionary Socialist Style, alternating standardised demonisation of the enemy with preposterous self-sanctimony, eg: "Lies. Who has ever heard a lie from the lips of a revolutionary?"
Eventually Castro reads aloud an undated letter from Che, in which his erstwhile comrade heaps praise on the dictator while renouncing all his official positions and Cuban citizenship: "… on new battlefields I will carry with me the faith that you inculcated in me … to fight against imperialism wherever it may be". The letter, short as it is, reveals Che's romantic, heroic self-conception while hinting at his desire for martyrdom. It is also the best-written thing in the book.
In fact, Guevara was in Congo, where he was fighting for the cause of Marxist-Leninist flapdoodle, before heading off to Bolivia to fight for the cause of Marxist-Leninist flapdoodle … which brings us to the second chapter, a transcript of the televised address Castro delivered announcing Che's death. After abusing the imperialists for a bit, Castro embarks on a rambling analysis of photographs, news reports, official statements from the Bolivian government, and Che's diary. After exhausting all the possibilities (could the corpse be a fabricated wax figure?) he comes to the inescapable conclusion: Che is an ex-Che.
Guevara now gained access to the pantheon of dead counter-culture figures. Like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, he would never have to grow old, lose his mojo or smile politely while listening to Sean Penn talk crap. Forever young, he would remain a charismatic symbol of "liberation" for millions. Castro, meanwhile, has enjoyed four decades plus of goodwill-by-association, even if Guevara's posthumous global celebrity has had little to do with him – as the rest of his memoir, a series of snapshots of the growth of Cuba's Che cult, mercilessly reveals.
Castro sets the template early, in a speech delivered before a million people at a memorial rally in Havana in 1967. Castro blends memories of their struggles together with praise for his fallen comrade as an "… artist of revolutionary war! … a truly model revolutionary … He wrote with the virtuosity of a master of the language … his versatile intelligence was able to undertake with maximum assurance any task of any kind." Che was a man of action, a universal genius, and ultimately "a model of what future humanbeings (sic) should be".
The rest of the book is filled with the same anecdotes and virtues repeated incessantly. Unlike international style icon Che – a floating face of dubious authenticity, the Turin shroud of anti-capitalism – Castro's portrait at least has content. However he can only really see one flaw in his deceased BFF. Twenty years after Guevara's execution, he admits to an Italian journalist: "Che seemed to be a man who sought death."
And here, perhaps, we have the slip I was hoping for at the beginning, confirming what is clear even from Castro's stultifying sketches of a socialist saint: the real Che loved violence and suicide missions. Having defeated the US-backed Batista regime in an amazing David v Goliath battle, he thought he could do it again and again, and if he couldn't then he preferred martyrdom to compromise. Thus Castro never bothers to speculate what would have happened had Che lived – at least not until the late 1980s, when everything Castro had built was starting to look like an eccentric historical detour. If only they'd paid more attention to Che's economic thought, he says, then the errors of the last 20 years might not have happened. It would not have taken 14 years to build a single hotel.
Self-criticism is a Marxist-Leninist tradition. Even Stalin confessed to excesses, although he shifted blame to his underlings who were "dizzy with success". Che's big idea meanwhile was "voluntary work". He did, after all, say this: "Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity." Fortunately for Che, he never had to sell himself as a commodity; that was done to him after his death.
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